This invention relates generally to the field of computer systems. More particularly, a system and method are provided for caching type information for matching with un-typed service requests.
Web services are applications that that can be published and invoked in a manner independent of language and transport protocol. Thus, they include loosely coupled, distributed applications that can be accessed from multiple types of platforms (e.g., Unix-based, Windows-based) using different programming languages (e.g., Java, C++). Among other characteristics, they operate independently of the underlying transport protocol (e.g., HTTP, SMTP), and support synchronous and asynchronous communications.
Web services are often considered the 3rd generation of distributed computing, because they provide greater interoperability and make greater use of standards than 2nd generation technologies such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), COM (Component Object Model) and other more-tightly coupled, less-interoperable applications.
With web services, a service offered by a web service provider is called by a web service requester or consumer via a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) request. The SOAP request may include any number of parameters for input to an operation that is provided by the service and identified in the request. The parameters may be typed or un-typed, meaning that the data types of the parameters are or are not identified in the request. If typed, the web service provider can easily unmarshal the parameters and invoke the requested operation.
However, if the parameters are un-typed, the web service provider must lookup the data types before invoking the operation. Typically, the service refers to the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) document that describes the web service and its operations. This increases the turnaround time of the request and requires the WSDL to be parsed, which slows execution of the requested operation.